A CENTURY OF CARING: The St Margaret’s Hospital
Story

Part Two: The truth about Great Barr Park
Colony
by Peter Allen

This second of three articles celebrating a
Century of Caring on the Great Barr Hall
Estate focuses on the widely-misunderstood colony
years. But first, some historical background
material.

Towards the close of the nineteenth century, a number
of factors led to a growing interest in the affairs
of the learning disabled, then called mental
defectives. The Education Act (1870) brought in
compulsory education for all children. Soon, dull and
backward children were becoming an inescapable
educational problem. At the same time, new
"knowledge" of heredity, coupled to the
eugenics movement associated with Francis Galton,
gave rise to acute and, with hindsight, exaggerated
fears of racial degeneration. Concern centred on the
"frightening fertility of the
feeble-minded", a class of mental defectives
not so severely impaired as idiots and imbeciles, but
numerically greater and requiring "care,
supervision, and control for their own protection or
the protection of others".

In the wake of this hysteria, a Royal Commission on
the Care and Control of the Feeble-Minded was
appointed in 1904. It found nearly 150,000 mental
defectives who were not certified under the existing
lunacy laws. Of these, just over a third were under
Poor Law supervision in workhouses, cheek-by-jowl
with the destitute but normal poor. Another third
were receiving no care or supervision at all. The
remainder were either children at school or inmates
in prisons, inebriate reformatories and similar
institutions.

The epochal Mental Deficiency Act (1913) was spawned
by this Royal Commission. It outlined the
circumstances which rendered defectives
"subject to be dealt with" and prescribed
a form of procedure for their committal to
institutions or, rarely, care under guardianship.
Local authorities were to provide these institutions,
in the form of farm and industrial colonies, in order
to train and employ mental defectives away from
society. They were also required to
‘ascertain’, certify and detain mental
defectives in their area.

In many cases local authorities used a loophole in
the Act to delegate their responsibilities back to
Poor Law Guardians, a particularly retrograde step
which went against the spirit of the new legislation.

Terms such as 'mental defective', 'idiot', 'imbecile'
and 'feeble-minded', now used wholly in a pejorative
sense, were legally defined in the Act. Doctors were
left largely to their own judgment as to what
constituted a diagnosis of mental defectiveness. Lack
of training, prejudice, imprecise criteria, and the
absence of standardised psychometric testing led to a
climate of arbitrariness. In fairness, most doctors
tried their best under difficult circumstances.

The process of institutionalisation required that a
person should first have been diagnosed as
"mentally defective". Only then could
they become "subject to be dealt with" by
virtue of a number of 'triggers'
including being found neglected, abandoned, or
without visible means of support; guilty of a
criminal offence; undergoing imprisonment or
detention; an habitual drunkard; ineducable; or in
receipt of poor relief at the time of giving birth to
an illegitimate child or when pregnant of such a
child.

A petition for an Order to place a defective in an
institution required medical certificates from two
qualified medical practitioners, one of whom was
approved for this purpose by the Board of Control.
There were severe penalties for supplying incorrect
information. Stories of people being "put
away" solely at the whim of a parent or
magistrate are apocryphal.

Walsall and West Bromwich Guardians drew up plans for
the large number of mental defectives and epileptics
in their charge soon after setting up the
children’s home described in the last article.

The Local Government Board initially approved four
homes for 225 patients (45 men, 40 women, 70 boys, 70
girls) in 1913. The First World War delayed progress
and the first two homes, for men and boys (Prince
Edward Home and Wells Home), were not ready for
occupation until the first week in 1918. Lavender and
James Home, for women and girls, remained unfinished
until well into 1921.

The rigorous application of the provisions of the
Mental Deficiency Act, led to an additional 342 beds
and ancillary buildings being built in the late
1920s. Contracts to take mental defectives from other
areas helped to defray the considerable costs of the
Great Barr Scheme.

The new homes were ranged around the original four
villas in a pleasing horse-shoe shape, which is
retained in the present-day Bovis Homes development.
[Incidentally, Great Barr Hall was once known as the
Netherhouse, to distinguish it from nearby Old Hall,
but was NEVER known as Nether Hall!]

This 'training colony' for the 'feeble-minded', a
classification reserved for the most able mental
defectives, was nearly self-sufficient. The men and
boys were engaged in shoemaking, tailoring,
bricklaying, painting, agriculture and horticulture.
The women and girls were engaged in the laundry,
kitchens, sewing room or in domestic work.

Within their individual capabilities, all the
colonists were more or less gainfully employed.
Whenever possible, those of less ability, the
so-called 'low-grade unimproveable types', were
deliberately excluded from the colony.

If you wish to know more about the mental deficiency
era, particularly with regard to Great Barr Park
Colony, you should read my extended chapter in
Learning Disability Nursing Practice (Quay
Books, 2009). Contact me at peterallen@tiscali.co.uk
with queries and comments.